Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she explores some of the racial issues raised in Chesnutt's short story.

In 1880, while he was still working as a schoolteacher in North Carolina, Charles W. Chesnutt wrote in his journal, "The object of my writing would not be so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites—for I consider the unjust spirit of caste that is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism—I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people: and I would be one of the first to head a determined, organized crusade against it. . . . The...